Would we all not agree that terror suspects are detained by ANY security agency for a reason?

Then why are the media listening to the so called victims of torture? These are the people just like a child that has been asked if he has eaten a cake and has cake all over his face are the ones claiming to be the victims.

Please someone stop the media from helping to give rights to these hypocrites, as these are the same people who would not think twice about blowing up you or your family in order to try and get their way.

Toture them to get the truth and prevent other attrocities, why not? They gave up their rights when they went to the terror camps and started to learn to make bombs and did the surveilance for others more capable.

Who agrees? Who dis-agrees?

deanhills

So what happens if the person who is being detained is innocent? Remember, the problem here is that someone gets to be tortured who has not had the privilege of a hearing of a kind first to show that he/she is guilty. We have a dilemma here of rights of the individual versus rights of the Government, and who gets to decide who will be tortured? The normal rule is that someone is supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. In certain cases it is obvious that we are dealing with real villians, i.e. when terrorists are caught with their hands dirty while they are doing their bad acts, but what about the grey areas, when people are being detained "under suspicion" rather than "on the basis of facts"? What if you had been detained if inadvertently a terrorist had befriended you in a pub, and your local intelligence organization found that this terrorist had phoned you a few times? Since you have been apprehended under a special Intelligence Act you do not have access to any immediate representation, and can be incarcerated in places that other people who would be looking for you cannot find you?

I feel for your arguments, as of course there are also the rights of intended victims of acts of terror that have to be considered. The people who are being detained could potentially be able to give information on an impending bomb blast for example. However, it is common sense that that information would have to be extracted very soon, as almost immediately after being apprehended, the information that could be extracted from detainees would obviously be completely useless. The terrorists like the ones from Mumbai are on a very great sophistication level.

liljp617

There have been a few recent threads on the subject of torture here. I imagine you'll find the opinions of all people who often post in this forum section in those threads.

deanhills

liljp617 wrote:

There have been a few recent threads on the subject of torture here. I imagine you'll find the opinions of all people who often post in this forum section in those threads.

Agreed, and I was thinking about that too, however, maybe there is a different point of view here, from a different country, so would be interesting to look at the UK and its laws as separate from Gitmo and the United States.

liljp617

deanhills wrote:

liljp617 wrote:

There have been a few recent threads on the subject of torture here. I imagine you'll find the opinions of all people who often post in this forum section in those threads.

Agreed, and I was thinking about that too, however, maybe there is a different point of view here, from a different country, so would be interesting to look at the UK and its laws as separate from Gitmo and the United States.

Perhaps. Although I really doubt the responses from the consistent posters will be much different.

askchris

Quote:

liljp617
Perhaps. Although I really doubt the responses from the consistent posters will be much different.

My reason for creating this thread is that there are media headlines at the moment in the UK about this very subject and I find it hard to believe that the terrorists that have come back from guantanomo bay back to the uk are claiming that their human rights have been violated.

In the UK unlike the US we are subject to European law which states that people have human rights, including convicted terrorists it would seem. This is the same European parliament that states what shape and size fruit should be.

Personally I would like to see the UK become a member state of the US, and maybe we can see the terrorist scum fry in the chair or die by injection.

ocalhoun

1: Spelling Torture as Torcher is hilarious!

2: No, it shouldn't be used.
-There are better, more effective, and often faster ways to get information: pharmaceutical and psychological. (Especially when used in combination.)
-You shouldn't defeat something evil by becoming evil yourself.

deanhills

askchris wrote:

Personally I would like to see the UK become a member state of the US, and maybe we can see the terrorist scum fry in the chair or die by injection.

GULP! Are you serious? Interesting thought however!

ocalhoun wrote:

1: Spelling Torture as Torcher is hilarious!

I was really dim about this initially. When I replied the first time, I thought that there was a new law in the UK that was called after someone with the name "Torcher", and then a little after my second posting I clicked finally.

ocalhoun wrote:

2: No, it shouldn't be used.
-There are better, more effective, and often faster ways to get information: pharmaceutical and psychological. (Especially when used in combination.)
-You shouldn't defeat something evil by becoming evil yourself.

I agree, that is the ideal though. War is evil and so is terrorism. How can you beat war and terrorism without getting tainted by it?

liljp617

askchris wrote:

Quote:

liljp617
Perhaps. Although I really doubt the responses from the consistent posters will be much different.

Personally I would like to see the UK become a member state of the US, and maybe we can see the terrorist scum fry in the chair or die by injection.

Personally, I don't think torture and hate combat torture and hate.

May I ask you this? What are your thoughts on what should happen if a US military individual is taken into captivity by a terrorist group? We're as much "scum" in their eyes as they are "scum" in some people's eyes here.
*And to the person who will inevitably state that restrictions on torture and mistreatment apply to US troops and not the people we're holding: "From their perspective, just like ours, restrictions don't apply"*

Not to try and judge you, but you seem to have a lot of resentment, anger, and hate towards these people. Understandable, I certainly don't look up to them and think they're negatively effecting the world significantly.

But at some point, one has to take a step back and look at the big picture. Feelings of resentment, anger, and hate shut the eye of rationality and reason; they bring out the worst in everyone. To me, we're ideally trying to end such degrees of resentment and hate by, well, killing them.

What good does it do to spend so much in terms of lives and money to combat resentment and mindless hate only to go on to replace it with our own? To borrow from the great Robert F. Kennedy:

Quote:

Some Americans who preach nonviolence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear; violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleanings of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

If we are to fight this war for however many more years, it is to be a moral war, at least as moral a war can be. To my knowledge, every recent war the US and its allies have been in the claim is always that we have, not only the superior military strength, but also the superior morality. We're the "good guys," they're the "bad guys." Their ideology is "evil," our ideology will bring greatness to the world. You can't make such a claim when you're committing heinous actions just like your "evil" enemy.

You can have whatever opinion you wish on the topic, but I think such a topic demands more thought than the emotion-filled, resentful "maybe we can see the terrorist scum fry in the chair or die by injection." It solves nothing; we're better than that (I hope).

ocalhoun

deanhills wrote:

ocalhoun wrote:

2: No, it shouldn't be used.
-There are better, more effective, and often faster ways to get information: pharmaceutical and psychological. (Especially when used in combination.)
-You shouldn't defeat something evil by becoming evil yourself.

I agree, that is the ideal though. War is evil and so is terrorism. How can you beat war and terrorism without getting tainted by it?

By using drugs and mind-tricks to get information, not torture.

deanhills

ocalhoun wrote:

deanhills wrote:

ocalhoun wrote:

2: No, it shouldn't be used.
-There are better, more effective, and often faster ways to get information: pharmaceutical and psychological. (Especially when used in combination.)
-You shouldn't defeat something evil by becoming evil yourself.

I agree, that is the ideal though. War is evil and so is terrorism. How can you beat war and terrorism without getting tainted by it?

By using drugs and mind-tricks to get information, not torture.

That is not evil?

liljp617

deanhills wrote:

ocalhoun wrote:

deanhills wrote:

ocalhoun wrote:

2: No, it shouldn't be used.
-There are better, more effective, and often faster ways to get information: pharmaceutical and psychological. (Especially when used in combination.)
-You shouldn't defeat something evil by becoming evil yourself.

I agree, that is the ideal though. War is evil and so is terrorism. How can you beat war and terrorism without getting tainted by it?

By using drugs and mind-tricks to get information, not torture.

That is not evil?

If it doesn't have side-effects of long term/permanent physical or mental damage, as torture is guaranteed to have, I say it's a legitimate form of getting information for protection. Unfortunately, I don't have the ability to make myself trust any institution or individual to make the decision of what is long term physical or mental damage...

ocalhoun

deanhills wrote:

ocalhoun wrote:

deanhills wrote:

ocalhoun wrote:

2: No, it shouldn't be used.
-There are better, more effective, and often faster ways to get information: pharmaceutical and psychological. (Especially when used in combination.)
-You shouldn't defeat something evil by becoming evil yourself.

I agree, that is the ideal though. War is evil and so is terrorism. How can you beat war and terrorism without getting tainted by it?

By using drugs and mind-tricks to get information, not torture.

That is not evil?

It is less evil...

If you try too hard to completely eliminate everything evil from your country, you'll become pacifist, and probably be conquered sooner or later, by a government much more evil than your original one. (Why else would they go around conquering pacifist countries?)

This world is too rough of a neighborhood for somebody who's all good and no evil to survive in.

deanhills

ocalhoun wrote:

deanhills wrote:

ocalhoun wrote:

deanhills wrote:

ocalhoun wrote:

2: No, it shouldn't be used.
-There are better, more effective, and often faster ways to get information: pharmaceutical and psychological. (Especially when used in combination.)
-You shouldn't defeat something evil by becoming evil yourself.

I agree, that is the ideal though. War is evil and so is terrorism. How can you beat war and terrorism without getting tainted by it?

By using drugs and mind-tricks to get information, not torture.

That is not evil?

It is less evil...

If you try too hard to completely eliminate everything evil from your country, you'll become pacifist, and probably be conquered sooner or later, by a government much more evil than your original one. (Why else would they go around conquering pacifist countries?)

This world is too rough of a neighborhood for somebody who's all good and no evil to survive in.

I totally agree with what you say, think that has always been how I looked at it as well. When people however fiddle with drugs, this could be very harmful, perhaps even more harmful than physical torture such as not allowing to sleep, taking away physical comforts, repeated interrogations, as those interrogations have to be torture anyway when they go over a certain number of hours. I wonder however if those kinds of "torture" would make any difference to your really hard core professional and sophisticated terrorist. At the lower level, it may even take a very mild form of torture to get information, but at the "most needed" level with your hardened terrorists, wonder whether any of it is really helpful, other than that you have removed that terrorist from more harmful acts, although when one goes "missing", I'm sure he is easily replaced by those terrorist organizations who would have another reason (i.e. incarceration of one of their mates) for motivating relatives/friends to join in accelerated terrorist acts.

ocalhoun

deanhills wrote:

physical torture such as not allowing to sleep, taking away physical comforts, repeated interrogations, as those interrogations have to be torture anyway when they go over a certain number of hours.

Actually, those would go under the category of psychological tricks...

If you count those, then society tortures the homeless constantly, police torture every person arrested, and babies torture their parents.

deanhills

ocalhoun wrote:

deanhills wrote:

physical torture such as not allowing to sleep, taking away physical comforts, repeated interrogations, as those interrogations have to be torture anyway when they go over a certain number of hours.

Actually, those would go under the category of psychological tricks...

If you count those, then society tortures the homeless constantly, police torture every person arrested, and babies torture their parents.

I agree that the latter is happening. For example it has happened quite often that people who are innocent cave in after relentless interrogations by police, just to get the interrogations to end. And yes, babies do torture their parents, no doubt about that. We could even stretch it to teachers torturing students with some of their teaching ..... media could also be torturing us with some of their news reporting ...